Chinese cloned monkey three questions
Today, the results of the birth of the world's first individual cell cloned monkey have attracted strong attention. The international top academic journal Cell has published related papers online. There are also many questions that come with it. For example, "Is the cloned monkeys out, is the cloner still far away?" "Why can China lead the world this time?" The reporter interviewed relevant experts.
Since the monkey has been cloned, will it be cloned?
After the results were announced, one of the most concerned questions was: Since the non-human primate macaques that are similar to humans have been cloned, does it mean that the next step can be cloned?
Pu Muming, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "This is a matter of public concern. I can make it clear that the purpose of this work is not to clone people, but to improve human health. Study basic services in brain science."
He said that the breakthrough of somatic cell cloning monkey technology now means that “the technical barriers of cloning people have been removedâ€, which means that it is technically feasible, but researchers will not consider related cloning studies on humans. There are no plans to clone people.
"It is not necessary to conduct research on human cloning for research related issues, and social ethics does not allow cloning," Pu Muming said. In his view, any scientific discovery is a double-edged sword, which may bring about tremendous progress, and may also lead to a series of crises. Nuclear energy and genetic editing are typical examples. As for the ethical issues of life sciences, not only scientists need to pay attention, but also the government departments and the entire public to participate in the process of restricting people's behavior through legislation and making correct decisions.
Pu Muming added, "We must pay attention to new technologies, but don't be afraid." According to him, this breakthrough in the study of cloned monkeys is expected to allow some ethical controversy to be "dissolved" to some extent.
At present, China exports tens of thousands of macaques each year, mainly for scientific research and drug screening. Pu Muming said that such things are controversial on ethical issues. Now with somatic cell cloning monkey technology, researchers can use somatic cells to effectively perform gene editing in vitro, produce a large number of embryos with identical genotypes, and develop a large number of embryos. A model monkey with the same genetic background.
Pu Muming said that researchers only need to use a small number of cloned monkeys, it is possible to complete a very effective drug screening.
What can a breakthrough in somatic cell cloning monkey technology do?
So what can a breakthrough in somatic cell cloning monkey technology be used for?
Pu Muming told reporters that the sole purpose of cloning non-human primates is to serve human health. The successful construction of somatic cloned monkeys not only scientifically confirms that macaques can be cloned by somatic cells, and more importantly, it can Make macaques a "really useful" animal model to help understand the human brain and develop new therapies for treating human diseases.
Pu Muming said that the study of human diseases often uses a mouse model, but the drugs screened by the mouse model have mostly no effect or side effects in human experiments - the rats and people are far from each other.
The primates are the closest to humans. Through somatic cell cloning technology, new breakthroughs can be made in the study of many diseases such as neuroscience, reproductive health, and malignant tumors. For example, the use of brain disease model monkeys can bring unprecedented bright prospects for the study, intervention, and diagnosis of brain diseases.
Sun Qiang, a leading scientist in the study and a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that after the breakthrough in cloning monkey technology, the primary task was to build a large number of monkeys with identical genetics by increasing the success rate of cloned monkeys. Which gene is controlled, it is possible to make an accurate analysis by comparing these monkey groups.
Pu Muming also mentioned that the success of somatic cell cloning monkeys indicates that China can establish a "Jackson Lab" modeled on non-human primates - the world's largest model animal research and development base and sales company, established since 1929. Up to now, more than 7,000 genetically edited mouse strains have been cultivated and sold for the international biomedical community.
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